Re: Pear shaped matter?

You, sir, owe me a new keyboard.

Re: Impressive

That was another migration, done (and proudly announced by M$) some years ago. Some results from the Choccy Factory say this was in 2000. I remember it as later, but then at my age time does travel faster.

Needless to say, it involved all sorts of glitches and downtime. And about 4 times as much compute power to deliver the same service.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb496985.aspx is interesting reading. El Reg commented on it too http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/21/ms_paper_touts_unix/

Re: Die Hard II

All they needed to do was give out an incorrect atmospheric pressure for the location.

Rememberer a documentary on a company that flew cargo (mostly) for the oil exploration - Lion Air. Pilot coming into land at a Nigerian field - pointed ouit the wreckage at the side of the runway where the tower had given out incorrect pressure, pilot thought he as a few metres above the runway when he, errr, wasn't. Bang,

Re: Why me?

It's because you're too close to the exchange. It's a well-hidden fact, but if your line is connected directly into the exchange without going via a street cabinet (known as an "exchange-only", or EO line) then VDSL (the modulation technique used over the short bit of copper from the fibre termination to your property) is not possible.

It's theoretically possible to put the kit that would be in the big cabinet linked to the street cabinet directly into the exchange, but here are potential interference issues that mean this isn't approved.

Last time I looked, there was some waffling from BT about what they proposed to do about such subscribers (it's a surprisingly large number) but nothing concrete.

Re: The technology is rather relevant there

"Once you are at a central office, bandwidth is essentially free"

I suggest you look at BT wholesale bandwidth charges to ISPs if you believe that.

Re: You are right.. and wrong

I've been in love with Supermicro for ages :-) They seem to get server design Right, especially mid-range, unlike Dell (wot, only 2.5" drives in your 2U server ?? I'm not made of money)

Re: Free Is Good @The Dim View - LO IS as good as MS office, better in some ways

You must have a very different set of end users from mine. They all hate they ribbon (some even more than I do). They range from professional PAs and copy typists through the standard PHBs to professional engineers, legal types, and ex-RN people.

Re: Free Is Good

You seem to miss the point I made up there (yet to receive any downvotes....), which was that upgrading MS Office is, in practice, no different from a complete change of package - i.e., a "big bang" upgrade. So that argument is moot, unless you plan on never upgrading MS Office.

Re: Free Is Good @Denarius

I will observe that whilst the things that break in M$ Office between releases may well be documented, you need a brain the size of a planet to determine which (if any) of these changes might impact your systems. In which case, the "upgrade" is in reality as much effort as a new product.

And please, can someone explain to me why the Office UI at Office 2007 and beyond completely ignores the UI standards of Windows ?? Why it's interface is utterly different from, say, Internet Explorer, let alone Office 2003 ?? If the Ribbon was the way forward, it should have become the Windows UI standard and ALL apps should have been updated. Otherwise, don't make the change. Human factors 101.

And my immediate PITA - why does Office 2010 OEM not have downgrade rights ??...

Re: We are kind of back up

Of course numbers ported off CW/Thus will fail to route, too. That's the way it works.

Since the industry blew a big raspberry a while back at Ofcom over dragging number portability into the 21st century, everyone remains at risk of losing their numbers if the owner of the number range goes titsup and their switches are pulled from the network.

See "Ionica"

How right you are

You're absolutely right. In the USofA, having just looked for a patent on the thing you're developing can be enough to lead to a determination of wilful infringement. That leads to the damages being tripled - a little bit more than "being punished harder".

So all development is carried out with no reference to patents, given that someone, somewhere is guaranteed to have got a highly ambiguous or totally obvious patent that can be twisted to demonstrate infringement by your product. So best to avoid those guaranteed damages being tripled.

This is reason no. 3404 that the patent system is Broken.

Re: 15%

The multitude of court cases worldwide would suggest that Apple is anything BUT happy with a meagre 15% of the market, as they join World + Dog in the new game of Gaining Marketshare By Litigation.

Darl must be proud.....

Re: Not Just Radio Amateurs

I'd say that the coalition in power during WWII was anything but technically ignorant, led by WSC.

Indeed, they sought out the very best people and actually listened to them. Mostly. It was a vital factor in our victory.

Re: Is this the start of a trend?

The decent engineers will spec it up a further 2x to account for the actions they know the accountants will take :-)

Re: Bets?

The people who actually made the decision - the politicians - are now gone, to be replaced (much like the project managers) with another pile of incompetents.

Anyone who claims they didn't see this mega-train-wreck coming was totally blind. Everyone with a brain cell and a level of vested interested below "total" said that this would never, ever, ever work. But did the Government listen ?? Nope. They signed off on it. They are the culpable ones.

And don't even get me started on Local E-Government.......

'coz they'll never learn.

Re: Alternatives

Or into paying the $1,000,000,000 fine. Plus the Commission's costs over the appeal.

Re: What about travel cards?

And, on a similar topic, what about those of us who have Network Gold Cards ("annual season tickets in the former Network SouthEast area") "loaded" onto our Oyster Cards. This gives the Gold Card discount automatically on qualifying (off-peak) LU journeys. HTF will that be implemented with Pret-style payment ??

DTDD

Ooooh yes, that would be delicious.

A whole new series (or 10) of DTDD could be dedicated to phone hacking, bribing plods, etc. The material would be endless.

"I'm not here".....

Re: A long way past satire

Dunno about you, but as well as laughing out loud I also nodded sagely (not sadly) and said "Yup, that about sums it up." when they were first broadcast.....

Re: @Tim of the Win:

We used to have a nationalised company for fixed-wire telecommunications. In fact, it was a Government Department before that.

Ok, they were the (monopoly) service provider too, but tell me just how innovative, un-bureaucratic and efficient they were. And just how well they did forward planning. Remember 2-3 year waits for a telephone line to be installed ??? I do.

Now fast forward into today's world where telecomms technology moves at least 10x faster, and this idea, whilst appealing, would be a total disaster if implemented. The problem, if anything, is that the remnant of the aforementioned organisation has too much residual power and coverage left over from its monopoly days, making it so much harder for the community broadband model to be financially viable. OK, that isn't radio comms, but the same effects would apply.

It's like The Good Old Days of British Railways when all the trains ran on time, tickets were cheap, there were no serious accidents and every employee greeted a passenger with a cheery smile.

"3g was ridiculously expensive for a long time because the networks were forced into paying so much for it."

The networks weren't forced into paying those ridiculous amounts. The spectrum went to an open auction (with certain build-out requirements of the winners) and the networks went into a bidding war for it. Just like you occasionally (!!!!) see on eBay, the result was that the winners massively overpaid. Whatever the reason was for that, there was no coercion involved.

Re: Assembly?

HP2100 assembler, hand-craft into 1's and 0's, then punch it in on the front panel switches.

That's how I was taught REAL programming by the great Dr Munro, Yr 2, EE at Imperial.

Time to design a USB-connected proper front panel for the Raspberry PI, then these schoolkids can really learn how a computer works.

</old-fart>

Re: may i be the first

If you care to read most of the comments, you'll not see bitching at a particular cloud/outsourced/managed services/whatever this year's marketing buzzword is/etc provider, but at the idea that this cloudy thingy is some sort of panacea to all your IT availability issues, and you can throw away any other business continuity solution.

It isn't. Factor in proper BC, Due Diligence over the providers' offerings, and service failure insurance (ha!!!) and suddenly all those putative cost savings go Poof!!!

Unless, of course, your name is Matt Asay......

Danger, Will Robinson. Jobs RDF influence detected.

The claimed patent clearly describes a process well-covered by prior art, as numerous previous posters have pointed out.

Go read up why patents were originally introduced, and ask yourself if the current uses that the legislation are being put to are compatible with the original goals.

Finally... Apple, in all its life, introduced comparatively little that was novel. It is a tribute to Steve's excellent marketing and design skills, his attention to detail, and finally the power of the RDF that World+Dog believes it to be a significant innovator.

Do you know...

Now tell me which OEM is going to jeopardize their Microsoft bribe by not installing this feature?

There, fixed that for you.

You think the FAT32 patent is valid ?? (Yes, I know part of it was upheld. It's still bollox and full of prior art)

"Where my web based <name any app you fancy>"

To which my only response is "Why would you want that ??"

You owe me now.

Now you've really brought back bad memories. Even worse than the thinnet unreliability.

OK, it was George IV, not George III.

1972, first ever programming course (Algol, Kingston Poly, summer hols at end of Lower VIth)

The ASR33 readers were fucked. Well, poorly maintained really. So if you missed a typo and therefore couldn't backspace and delete the error, and had to "copy" the tape up to the typo, the errors that the reader introduced led to getting a correct tape being a divergent process. Unless you found one of the 2 ASRs that were working OK-ish.

What with the overnight turnaround, I think all I got working in a week was the prime numbers up to 99......

Sultans

Sultana is obviously the nane if their currant IT system.

We had a rental model before

and we called it "bureau services"

Remember Datasolve ??